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Wednesday, 9 March 2016

My Top 5 Photo Editing Apps

Over time, I have been teaching myself how to edit my photos from my iPhone, as this is how I take most of my pictures. The quality of the iPhone camera has improved dramatically, and with a little editing from some of my favourite apps, you can have your photos looking just as good as those taken with a premium brand camera.

I have put together my top 5 apps below-

1. Snapseed

This app is amazing for all kinds of editing as it has a lot of features within it. You can brighten backgrounds, sharpen the image, saturate, contrast etc. The reason I love this app in particular is that you can select certain areas of the picture to edit separately. This means that you can edit a background to be black and white and keep the main focus of the image in colour for example. I use this to brighten backgrounds to create a cooler, whiter background in some pictures. You can also smooth out lines or whiten eyes with this one, but in general, I use this for editing the backgrounds of my images.

2. Perfect365

This is similar to Facetune as it detects your face in the image and allows you to edit many parts of the face. I tend to whiten the whites of my eyes to make them pop, along with smoothing out the skin if I have any blemishes/spots. You can also do a full face of make up with this app which I find incredible. If you take a picture with no make up on, after using this app it can look like you've spent an hour doing your make up. Personally, I don't use anything other than the smoothing, eye whitening and sometimes teeth whitening with this app but there are plenty of things to explore within this one.

3. Relook

This app is similar to Snapseed in that it has lots of options to edit the full images, as well as image filters similar to Instagram, but with a lot more choice. The main feature I use within this app is the clarity function. I like to use this over the eyes to make your lashes pop, and also over the brows and lips. Sometimes when you edit an image you can lose the definition and the clarity function brings sharpness back to the image. There are lovely filters within this app too which you can adjust depending on how strong you would like the filter applied.

4. Diptic

This app is for adding a few images together to make a collage that will be the perfect square size for Instagram. You can choose from dozens of formations and pop your favourite images straight into them. You can also adjust the borders or boundaries too so that the shape of the images is unique for each finished look. This one is pretty straight forward but I find myself using this every week. I love it for putting together collages of Harry's photos. You can also flip the images, so this is how I create the "mirrored" effect on some of my outfit posts. All you need to do is add the same image to a split screen template and flip one of the images them around.

5. Instazz

Lastly, this app has many features like the ones mentioned above, however I only ever use this app to add blurred out sides to an image. If my image is not taken in the square format then I sometimes upload it to this app, where it gives you the white border on each side. I then change the border to the blurred effect and adjust how clear I want the edges. Really easy to use, and I'm sure there are a tonne of similar features in here too, but the blurring effect is why I turn to this app.

These are some of my favourite editing apps. If you have any other apps that you love and I should check out, please let me know in the comments section below.

I think the key to editing is not to overdo it, which can be hard when with just a touch of a button, you can change any feature about yourself. I try to just enhance the features that I already have, as we all know Instagtam is mostly about pretty images. I don't think there is anything wrong with editing your images once you still look like the same person at the end of it! I was definitely an avid user of the smoothing function before, and my skin ended up looking plastic in some photos. I guess when suffering from acne, this helped me to remove the blemishes I didn't like on my skin, but now I just like to edit a little more subtly and enhance what I have instead of hiding it. My last tip... If you can take a picture in natural day light, do! It's the best filter for any image.